Common Ground

On stepping outside of stories

I cannot comprehend war.

A large part of me cannot fathom that - in Ukraine and Sudan and Gaza and even my home country - human beings are shooting, bombing, abducting, and torturing each other. And human beings are still lining up to join in the fight, to be the bombers and the shooters.

There is no cause, no story, no shared identity for which I would kill another human being.

There is no cause for which I would support others killing on my behalf, for which I would support sending deadly weapons to the fight.

I pledge allegiance to my soul, to my own sovereign being

and

I pledge allegiance to the great story, of Earth and water and air and fire, of evolution and embodiment, of Moon and Sun and planets and cosmos and consciousness, of an eternally unfolding sequence of present moments

but

everything in between, I hold lightly.

Nations, religions, political parties, philosophies, traditions, cultures, history, family. Even - I am learning - partnership and relationship.

I was born to two parents who had stepped out of religion, who had become in a sense outcast from family, and I have within me - it seems - a resistance to claiming membership in groups, an extreme allergy to groupthink.

I used to find it a mystery how some humans could choose to so dehumanize, so other others that they would exclude, discriminate, attack, kill.

And then, four years ago, this happened…

In just a few short months, a new divide emerged across society, and I watched as those communities most committed to non-discrimination became the ones checking papers at the door, disinviting the unclean ones even if they were previously best friends, close family.

I also watched as many people on both sides of this divide closed themselves off. You have showed me who you are, they said, and now I can no longer respect you.

Here is what I learned from the Great Vaccination Panic of 2021: All it takes to create separation, discrimination, even ultimately genocide is fear and a story. Fear of disease, or death, or economic ruin, or change, and a story about how those people are dangerous, how our lives and communities and countries will be safer if they are controlled, excluded, deported, defeated, exterminated.

If this is true, then the converse is also true: All it takes to dissolve separation, to heal divides is love and a willingness to step out of a story. To see the whole being rather than simply judging their choices, actions, beliefs.

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I have lived 40 years. 496 moon cycles. 14,667 days. 352,000 hours. 21 million minutes. 1.5 billion heartbeats. I was conceived in a moment of passion, nurtured in a womb for nine months, nursed through my first years, fed and bathed and snuggled. I have walked thousands of miles, eaten more than 40,000 meals, lived through love and loss and joy and pain, pondered the nature of existence, felt the stirrings of spirit within.

My body is composed of 30 trillion cells - all in communication and each filled with a universe of living processes - and 40 trillion microbial symbionts. Working together, these cells convert light into vision, chemistry into scent and taste, touch and sunlight and wind into sensation, invisible waves into words and music, foods of all types into bone and muscle and energy and motion.

And I am halfway through, in all likelihood.

And if this is true of me, it is also true of them. Yes, them. You know, the bad people. The ones we have labeled enemy, or fascist, or racist, or illegal, or antivax, or Russian, or whatever the word of the day is. The ones whose entire sacred universe of existence, whose lifetimes of love and loss and memory we would reduce to one judgmental category. The ones whose deaths we would not mourn and might choose to hasten.

And yes, often enough we are acting in response. They have judged us, harmed us through their stories, and so we are returning the favor. This may be true, but we can step out of the story at any time, and invite them to join us there.

Let us honor our cultures, our traditions, our spiritual communities, our histories. They are the music to which we dance, the containers within which we discover and create who we are. But let us please not mistake them for the ground we dance upon. Our shared miraculous experience of aliveness, embodiment, immersion in and dependence upon the living systems of a living planet. May our stories become rooted, grounded in experience, in our senses, in our bodies, in that which we all too often ignore, call mundane, when we live in our minds.

I am not one to share in the outrage, to “stand with” some cause or another on social media, to attend the sign-waving and name-calling protests. And yet I do care. I long to live in a world where militaries and weapons and war are obsolete, where people of all identities and origins and ethnicities are honored and respected. I simply have no desire to broadcast to the world that “I am on this team” or “I am a member of this group, opposed to this other group.”

It is possible for activism to break out of the mold of othering - to shift instead toward healing - if instead of standing against what we fear, we stand for what we love. If we step out of our stories and see people in all of their complexity, all of their multidimensionality.

I am reminded of the local history of the Applegate family and the Yoncalla tribe who lived side by side and established a friendship across cultural divides in the 1850s. When the government came to remove the tribe to a reservation, the influential Applegate family kindly sent them packing. Their descendants remain friends to this day.

I am reminded of this iconic photograph of Ieshia Evans from 2016, approaching riot police with a calm poise, making their commitment to violence appear ridiculous.

Photo by Jonathan Bachman/Reuters

I am reminded of the book Rising Out of Hatred: the Awakening of a Former White Nationalist in which personal transformation arises not from angry confrontations but from unlikely friendships, those who saw the person rather than the story and then gradually helped the person to set the story aside.

I am reminded of the amazing story of Daryl Davis, the African American author and musician who has befriended at least 20 leading members of the KKK, calmly questioning their prejudices and ultimately convincing them to give up their robes, leading to a ripple effect and at least 200 people leaving the organization.

If we had ten thousand activists like Daryl Davis, willing to sincerely reach out and befriend those who have declared hatred, to build connections so deep that they dissolve stories and transcend boundaries, would we still have a KKK?

When I have suggested this approach, I have often been told that it is too much to ask of those who have been traumatised or marginalized to open in this way, that we need to maintain safe spaces, guard against hostilities and bad words and microaggressions, demand justice and accountability, fight back.

We do need safe spaces for personal healing, to become strong and rooted in ourselves, but - if we wish to heal the collective - we need to be willing to step out of them, to look far deeper than the labels we give ourselves and each other, the stories we inhabit.

Yes, it is hard, but we can do hard things. We live and grow through childbirth, chronic illness and pain, relationships ending, loss of our loved ones. Our fear says I must keep myself safe from you. Our morality says I am right and you are wrong, you must be held accountable. And yet, collectively, our actions and choices from this fear and rigidity create a world filled with hatred and intolerance, guns and bombs and wars. Collectively, to become safer we must let go of our need for safety. And, however much we might wish that they change first, we cannot change them. We can only change ourselves, and weave those changes into the fabric of our shared experience.

Whoever you are, whatever you have done, whether you have suffered at the hands of others or commanded armies in the name of your cause or your god, I invite you to step out of your stories, to allow your fear to soften, to relax into your body, into your senses, into the whole of your experience. And to recognize that - whoever it is you are fighting - that is their experience too.

We can do this.

I believe in us.